


Through Dangers Untold

by valamerys



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Elain is Sarah, F/M, Labyrinth AU, Lucien is the Goblin King, this is a direct crossover of things i'm sexually into and we should all be concerned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-11-05 11:13:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11012289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valamerys/pseuds/valamerys
Summary: Elain has made a grave mistake and wished her sisters away to the dangerous realm of the goblins. To get them back, she'll have to navigate a maddening labyrinth—and go toe-to-toe with its powerful, enigmatic ruler. Elain finds herself drawn to the red-haired Goblin King, but is he the tragic, lovesick prince from her mother's stories, or a wicked faerie who's only toying with her?(rating will go up with future chapters >:) )





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HI, WELCOME TO THE WORLD'S MOST SELF-INDULGENT AU, WE HAVE TIGHT PANTS, GLITTER, SEXUAL AWAKENINGS, SIBLING ANGST, MY FAVORITE SHIP, MUPPETS, SEXY DREAM DANCE SEQUENCES AND MINIMAL LOGIC
> 
> ENJOY YOUR STAY
> 
> ALSO THIS WILL EVENTUALLY HAVE LOTS MORE KISSING THAN THE ACTUAL MOVIE LABYRINTH, IN CASE YOU'RE NOT FAMILIAR WITH MY BRAND AND WERE FOR SOME REASON UNCLEAR ON THIS POINT

Their mother did not spend a great deal of time with the Archeron sisters, even before she died. Their father was in charge of their education, and he passed it on to a rotating series of tutors; the nanny minded them at play, the cooks fed them, the dogs cuddled with them when they were upset.

But mama Archeron did one thing, often in her elaborate party dresses, putting them to bed while her guests laughed and drank downstairs: she told stories. Elain remembers them well, remembers how often little Feyre fell asleep halfway through, how Nesta would sulk and declare that she didn’t need stories, she was too old for them, and would end up listening raptly by the end anyway.

She remembers one story best of all, would request it over and over again.

_“The Goblin King,” her mother says, her beautiful painted mouth tugging into a smile. “Was one of the High Fae, a very long time ago.”_

_“He was a prince,” Elain says helpfully, having heard the story many times over by now. Nesta,  terribly precocious at eight years old, rolls her eyes._

_“Yes,” Their mother says sweetly. “He was prince. A very handsome prince with long, fine hair. But he fell in love with a woman his father did not approve of. So to punish him, not only did they kill his love, but they banished him, to be lord of a miserable, strange kingdom no one wanted to rule. It was the land of the goblins, who all lived within a great labyrinth, which the High Fae had built to keep them from escaping and bothering the rest of the world.”_  

_Her voice is a dramatic hush as she says it, and Elain giggles as always._

_“This land was right on the border of the human world,” their mother goes on, her golden dress glimmering in the candlelight as she reaches over to tuck the covers up to a dozing Feyre. “And after a time, the prince— who was now the King of the Goblins—grew very bored with only creatures for company, and very curious about the humans over the wall. So he went to the great wise owl and made a bargain.”_

_Elain’s arms prickle with gooseflesh. They are all plenty aware of the seriousness of bargains._

_“He gave the wise owl one of his eyes, and in return the owl fashioned him a magic replacement, capable of seeing all the human realm.”_

_“Even us, right now?” Elain asks excitedly, even though she already knows the answer._

_Her mother laughs. “Yes, dearest, if he so chooses, he may be watching us right now from where he lives, in the castle beyond the goblin city. So you’d all better be very good and kind to each other, or he might let his goblins take you away!”_

_Elain laughs and even Nesta has to crack a grin that their mother returns. “But yes," she goes on quietly, as to not wake Feyre, "It is said that he can hear when we call him. And that he may even grant the wishes of special young men and women from time to time, if they say the right words.”_

_“Because he’s in love with them!” Elain blurts happily. She has been a romantic from a young age, and the idea of a lonely banished faerie prince loving from afar is terribly enticing even now._  

_Her mother smiles wryly. “Perhaps. If you believe some stories. Though others say that his lonely years have made him wicked, and he tricks them, and will take something of theirs to lure them to his labyrinth.”_

_“And then he makes them try to find their way through it until they die,” Nesta adds with a snicker. She knows the story too, try as she might to pretend otherwise, and she likes gore in hers where Elain likes romance._

_“That version’s not as nice,” Elain pouts, and her mother kisses her on the brow, the tale finished._

_“It’s only a story, dear. You can both believe whatever you like.”_

And Elain did. Year after year she’d whisper to the Goblin king, to hear nothing in return but Nesta’s occasional laughter at her.

Of course, at some point, they all stopped thinking about fairy tales.

 

 *****************************************************************************************************

 

“You could at least make an effort to not look like a peasant. It’s embarrassing to be seen with you.” 

“We _are_ peasants, Nesta. We’re not fooling anyone by pretending otherwise.”

 “Well it certainly doesn’t hurt! You think any of us will find good husbands by rooting around in the dirt like you do?!”

 “If by rooting around in the dirt you mean _hunting to keep us alive_ , I’d be happy to stop if that’s what you want!”

Elain, now twenty, sags against the windowsill, staring mournfully out towards the trees. Nesta and Feyre’s bickering goes on behind her, barely muffled by the sad excuse for a bedroom door. The cabin’s much too small to really avoid anything within it, but it’s gotten too cold to leave it— the landscape Elain stares out at is the bleak grey-brown of late fall. The chill seeps in from where the window’s badly affixed to the wall; She really should close the curtain, keep whatever scraps of warmth in the house they can, but she claims this small selfishness for herself, this tiny fragment of an escape.

Elain has her fair share of petty squabbles with Nesta— it’s inevitable, in such close quarters, with stomachs so empty— but it hurts far more to listen to Nesta and Feyre fight. It’s so obvious, to Elain, that their lashings-out aren’t _really_ meant for the other person, that they’re just each bound so tightly up in their own frustrations and self-loathing that one day they’ll strangle themselves, if not each other. And it’s equally obvious they’re too avoidant to realize it themselves, that they’ll all be trapped in this whirlpool of stale arguments and insults and hunger until, likely, Feyre gets hurt hunting and they all starve.

“Mother wouldn’t have wanted us to fight, Nesta,” Feyre says softly.

“She wouldn’t have wanted us to starve in a hovel, either,” Nesta hisses, and there’s the sound of clattering, Nesta having pushed something.

The wind picks up outside the cabin, and a little gust of cold air hisses through a crack in the window. Tears prick Elain’s eyes.

Their father isn’t home today, this being one of the rare occasions he takes it upon himself to actually provide for them by selling his carvings. It should make Elain feel better, but the emptiness of that gesture has long since been apparent, and, worse, it leaves Elain the only party privy to her sisters’ arguing, a tiny island caught between two storms. She tries so, so hard to keep despair from settling into her, to stay positive and light if only so one of them remains so, but some days it feels like her ribcage is collapsing inwards with the effort— and listening to Nesta snap at Feyre and Feyre bite back only compounds it.

“If you care about what mother would have wanted as much as you say, you could at least brush your hair,” Nesta adds nastily, to the sounds of shifting logs in the kitchen fireplace. “I doubt she’d want one of her daughters to look like such a _goblin_.”

 A _goblin_. Elain hasn’t thought about goblins in a very long time. Even the idea of the fae have been far away now for many years, receded into some fantastical thing from their glittering childhood. She wonders with some bitterness whether goblins are real at all, or just something their mother made up to entertain them.

“I doubt she’d care as long as it meant we had food on the table. But maybe if you _helped me_ —”

“I could help you all day long and you’d still come in here and _talk down_ to Elain and I.”

Elain winces, and with it one of the tears drops from her eye, trails down her cheek. She doesn’t care enough to wipe it away.

“Talk _down_ to you? Nesta, what are you talking about?”

“Oh, of course you’d deny it!”

Elain squeezes her eyes closed, tries to think harder of her mother’s old stories to drown them out.

_He was prince. A very handsome prince with long, fine hair. But he fell in love with a woman his father did not approve of._

The memory of the Goblin King awakens a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. It’s been so, so many years since she tried to invoke him, since that child’s faith eroded away even as she tried to stay hopeful. She used to lie awake at night, so certain he was real, that he could see her, that one day, he would answer. When did that stop?

_He gave the wise owl one of his eyes, and in return the owl fashioned him a magic replacement, capable of seeing all the human realm._

 The arguing in the kitchen gets louder, and as though in response, the wind buffets the house strongly enough that the rafters shake and the windows rattle in their frames. Elain draws her knees up, hugs them to herself. The howling mingles with the sounds of chairs scraping against the rush floor, with the groan of strained wood and the angry voices hollow with hunger that seem to grow louder and louder, meaner and meaner, and Elain wishes they would just _stop_ so badly.

_You’d all better be very good and kind to each other, or he might let his goblins take you away._

“I wish the goblins _would_ come and take you away,” she whispers at the sounds of her sisters, a mindless, selfish little thought that slips out of her like poison from a bottle. “Right now.”

The arguing stops.

Elain raises her head. The wind screams on, but whole house suddenly feels wrong; did their father return? What else would have made Nesta and Feyre break off their argument so quickly? Elain gets up and pushes open the door into the front part of the house, worry bubbling up in the pit of her stomach.

Her sisters are gone. 

She blinks at the empty room, examines it uselessly. the house is so small there’s nowhere not in sight they could possibly be.

“Nesta?” Elain calls, grabbing a cape to throw around herself as she hurries outside, looks around frantically into the gloom as the cold air bites at her arms, her ankles— no sign of them. “Feyre?!”

An ominous distant rumble of thunder matches the mounting terror in Elain’s thoat. “Nesta! Feyre!” She yells again, louder this time as she turns around, looking into the empty trees.

A titter of laughter sounds behind her and Elain whirls, a scream in her throat— but there’s nothing there. She clutches at the cape with trembling hands, and suddenly, another laugh behind her, from the trees this time. She turns again, and again there’s nothing there.

“Who’s there?!” She demands, trying to sound braver than she feels. “Nesta? Is that you?”

The wind swallows her voice as it howls between the branches, whips her cloak around and throws tendrils of hair in her face. It whistles through the cracks in the house, rocking it might lift it from the ground. More laughter accompanies it, more scurrying noises, and Elain whips back and forth desperately, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it is when thunder, closer, louder, cracks through the air like a mountain splitting in two. A bright, blinding flash of light accompanies it and Elain instinctively throws her head into her arms.

And then it all goes silent.

Silent and deadly, icily still. 

Even the wind vanishes to nothing, leaving Elain shivering, her own breaths magnified, her eyes screwed shut. Panic presses down on her, threatens to consume her as her thoughts swirl with Feyre and Nesta Feyre and Nesta Feyre and Nesta…

Slowly, shakily, she lowers her arms and opens her eyes. 

There’s a man standing before her, tall and severe, with a long, silky shock of bright red hair and eyes that don’t match. Elain almost cries out in shock but the air seizes in her lungs, leaving her with nothing but a strangled gasp as she staggers backwards.

Everything about him aches of inhumanity, from the obvious point of his years to the eerie flawlessness of his tan skin to the way he holds himself, more like a wolf than a man, coiled power in every inch of him. He wears strange clothes, faerie clothes: a leather coat with a tall collar, a voluminous, ragged cape, pants tighter and finer than anything Elain is used to seeing on village men. But it’s his features that are the most striking, beautiful and awful at once. His eyes are not merely mismatched, one is made of _metal—_ it whirs faintly as he looks at her. 

_He gave the wise owl one of his eyes, and in return the owl fashioned him a magic replacement, capable of seeing all the human realm..._

“You’re him, aren’t you?” Elain breathes. She can’t stop herself from trembling, fear and terrible certainty both flooding through her. “You… you’re the Goblin King.”

A close-lipped smile carves that angular face, but he says nothing.

“Please,” Elain blurts, “Please, if you’ve taken my sisters, bring them back.”

“What’s said is said.” He responds smoothly, and she stiffens at the deep timbre of the voice, the masculine lilt to it that affects her down to her bones. “I expected a little more gratitude for fulfilling your request, I must admit.”

Elain shakes her head helplessly, feeling tears begin to constrict her throat. “Please, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I was real?” He cocks his head at her, and the faint amusement in him seems to sharpen. Elain is struck too terrified to answer as he takes a step towards her. 

“You should know better than that, Elain,” he says, his voice dropping sweetly. “After all these years I’ve listened to you.”

“All… all these…” Elain is frozen, a frightened deer as he approaches her. “But you never— ”

“I was waiting for you to make a wish worth granting.”

_Though other stories say that his lonely years have made him wicked…_

The admission consumes Elain, heat sweeping through her. He _has_ been listening. He knows who she is, said her name. It is strange and heady to have it, the thing she wanted for so long, abandoned until today. Until this hour.

But what does it matter that he knows her name, when Nesta could be at the mercy of goblins as they speak? What does it matter that his attention is making her feel terror-sharp and weightless all at once, and she wants more more more of it, when Feyre might be locked in a dungeon somewhere?

“Please, I need my sisters back.” She means it to come out strong, the way Nesta would say it, but instead it sounds pathetic.

Some of that amusement evaporates off his expression, but he doesn’t stop advancing towards her. “Why?”

Elain flounders, fighting to resist the urge to step backwards into the cabin. What kind of a question is _why?_ “Because I love them,” Elain says helplessly. And then, with a stab of guilt, another answer. “Because my father and I cannot get on without them.”

“Certainly you can,” he says, almost chidingly. Delight flickers through that good eye. “You’ll live better without them, in fact.”

He steps wide of her, and world around them changes. Suddenly there is no cold biting through Elain’s cloak, no harsh grey forest bracketing them: only the soft greenness of spring, and gentle, hazy sunshine. Elain gasps, mind rebelling at the change. Magic, this is _magic_.

“I’ll give you everything they could possibly provide for you and more,” he says gently, at her side now, and the landscape morphs before Elain’s eyes. A beautiful manor house, surrounded by a lush, sprawling garden unfurls in front of them, a painting come to life. “You’ll be well-fed and dressed,” he goes on, watching her face as he circles her. “Your father can get his business back. You’ll have money for a dowry, a nice house with as many servants as you like, a pretty garden for you to keep.” There are two figures in the garden, half-fuzzy in the sun-drenched murkiness, but Elain identifies them with a shock as her and her father. And they’re… happy. Her father is standing straight in a way he hasn’t since they lost the fortune, helping her as she trims flowers; with money again, they could pay a proper healer to help with his leg. Elain’s heart twists. And the garden is lovely, but the thought of having a dowry, a _future_ , makes her want to weep— Nesta was not wrong about their prospects in the cabin being nonexistent.

Distantly, she watches this phantom version of herself laugh.

 “Do you want that?” He asks, and his mouth is at her ear, close enough that she can sense the weight and the warmth of him behind her, can hear that strange metal eye working in his head. Elain does not dare move to answer, lungs burning, lest some of this traitorous longing slip from her mouth and damn them all.

But she does not need to say. He knows. She can feel the vibrations of his voice in his chest he murmurs, low and magnetic, “Then forget your sisters.”

A shiver runs through her and it’s that that drags her back to reality, like awakening from a dream. The illusion of warmth vanishes as the throws herself away from him, shame washing over her, closing her throat. She’d almost said yes, almost been so weak that she’d leave Elain and Feyre to the mercy of this creature, and for what, some pretty illusions? His honeyed voice in her ear? It seems dangerous to even look at him, but Elain forces herself to, tries to keep her legs from shaking under her.

“I can’t,” she manages, taking another step backwards. The wind is reawakened in the harsh absence of the illusion, its chill mirroring the way his features harden into displeasure. “I’m very grateful to you for… for answering me, for offering me that, but I could never forget them,” Elain breathes, remembering her fear as she stammers out thanks she doesn’t really mean. “But all I want is my sisters back.”

That good eye flashes with something inscrutable. “You would do well to accept kindness when I offer it, Elain. It will not come often.”

With a flick of his cape, his demeanor becomes indifference, and he strides past her. “If you want your sisters back, you will have to get them yourself.”

“Where are they?” Elain manages to ask, throat dry.

“You know very well where they are." 

Elain suddenly has the terrible, sinking feeling of a presence behind her, the surety that if she turns it will not be the cabin there any longer. But as though bidden by a higher force, she looks anyway.

What a moment ago was a scrubby, dead forest and a miserable shack is now a sweeping landscape, falling from the rocky outcropping they stand on into lush valleys covered entirely in the twisting walls of a massive maze. The Labyrinth. Uneven and treacherous, the pathways wind inward in sections of hedge and stone and trees to—

_The castle beyond the goblin city._

It rises from the core of the thing miles and miles in the distance, an ominous, jagged structure, a nightmarish mockery of a proper castle. The twisted heart of a many-limbed beast. 

Elain is somehow certain that this time, their setting is no illusion. This is too real, too solid. Too terrifying. The air itself smells strange, carries a metallic tang too _other_ to be a part of the mortal realm. It’s the true labyrinth that lies before her now, vast and innumerable in its horrors.

“It’s not too late to turn back.” Elain is so caught up in the vastness of the view that she jumps to find his voice so close, so soft. She turns and meets those eyes again. His good eye— Elain almost says his human eye, but then, that is not right, no part of him is human— is brown, she realizes. Disarmingly so. 

“I can’t,” Elain says simply, searching that brown eye. 

He gives her the thinnest of smiles, sharp like a knife. “Such a pity.”

His long red hair is ruffled in the breeze as he takes a step backwards from her, produces a small hourglass from somewhere in his cloak. It’s empty. “I will give you three days to solve my labyrinth and find your sisters,” he says, and it’s with lazy, almost indulgent confidence. He taps the hourglass and it fills at the top, the trickle of sand immediately starting, the faint hiss signifying Elain’s time slipping away. “If, when the sand runs out, you still have not, then they’ll become part of my court forever.”

Elain swallows, tilts her head up a fraction trying to seem unafraid. By the way his mouth twists, he’s unconvinced. 

It’s all the warning Elain has before he tosses her the hourglass— but what she catches isn’t an hourglass at all. Or it is, rather, but it’s shrunk to no more than two inches tall, and attached to a long, thin chain. A necklace. Elain turns the thing over and over, but the sand continues to run in one direction; he’s given her a portable clock.

Or, in his mind, she supposes, a countdown to her failure.

“Such a pity,” he repeats, low and sweetly mocking, but when Elain looks up, her heart stutters in her chest.

He’s vanished. Gone, into the fabric of the world. This world, _his_ world. And she is alone in it, with the weight of her sand countdown and no one to help her. She tries not to let panic bleed through to her as she fastens the chain of the hourglass around her neck and turns to face the labyrinth fully.

It is irony of the highest order that it’s Elain standing here. This is a task meant for Feyre or Nesta; her sisters are the heroes, Elain is much more the type to be rescued than the type to do the rescuing. She wishes desperately she could summon them just for a moment, just to ask them what to do, to tell them she’s coming, to perhaps borrow some of that strength of will they both have. Elain can’t remember the last time she did something of note on her own, but she supposes she will have to get used to it.

With _such a pity_ ringing in her hears, she takes her first step towards the labyrinth.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am as shocked as you are that this updated

Elain expects the Labyrinth to be difficult, but she does not expect getting _into_ the Labyrinth to be quite so hard.

She spends at least twenty minutes walking around the great outer wall. The thing is three stories tall, built out of ancient blackish bricks and crumbling suspiciously in places, but impenetrable and moreover, doorless. She tries walking _away_ from it too, to gain perspective from which to see a theoretical door in the distance, but in some frustrating bit of magic, somehow she remains no more than a hundred feet from it no matter how long she walks. Perhaps she could climb it, if she were braver, but the stone is topped with such wicked-looking iron spikes that Elain does not have the nerve to try, so there seems to be no choice but to follow it like a river in hopes of an opening appearing. The ground around it is a strange mixture of broken stone flooring and dusty grass, interrupted by stunted tree limbs and the fluttering of large insects that collect around them.

Elain halts at last, directing a very peeved sigh in the wall’s direction. “Is there a door _anywhere_ in you?” She asks it. “Or is this the great joke, that I can’t beat the labyrinth if I can’t even get into it?”

Unsurprisingly, the wall does not answer.

Elain huffs, crosses her arms. “I bet your king thinks this is very funny.”

A high-pitched giggle answers her.

Elain whirls around. “Who’s there?”

There’s no-one but moths fluttering in the trees above her. Another giggle, and another— whatever’s there, there’s more than one of them.

“Hello?”

One of the moths darts by Elain’s face, and she bats at it on instinct—and then stops.

The moth has a distinctly human shaped body.

Elain turns to stare directly at the swarm of them, and the giggles increase. One comes to hover in front of Elain, and sure enough, it’s no moth at all, but a tiny, brown-skinned, human-shaped creature, no more than three and a half inches tall and dressed in gauzy rags.

The thing snickers, wings beating so fast they nearly blur. “You’re quite ugly for a human.”

“I--I beg your pardon,” Elain stammers.

Laughter peals from the thing’s throat, echoed by the pack that now flutters around them. The faerie—because that’s what it is, Elain realizes numbly, a faerie— is beautiful, in an otherworldly kind of way, tiny moon-white teeth and the most exquisite miniature features.

“Well, I don’t think she’s ugly,” a faerie ventures from somewhere above Elain’s head.

“She’s hideous,” says another, from behind her. The voices are light but have a clear quality to them like ringing church bells; it’s a little dizzying to listen to multiple at once. “Got all those dots on her face.”

“Those are _freckles_ , Snowdrop.”

“Could any of you tell me, please,” Elain ventures, remembering herself, “How to get into the Labyrinth? I can’t seem to find a door. And by the way, I’m _not_ ugly.”

Elain feels something tug at her mess of a bun, a faint weight on her shoulder. “Can I braid her hair?” A faerie asks.

“Ew, Marigold, don’t get your hands all filthy with human hair.”

The one ostensibly named Marigold begins to cry, a pointed sound from such a small body, directly into Elain’s ear. None of the others seem bothered by it, and Elain feels tiny pulls on the edges of her cape and sleeves.

“Do you think we could eat her? She smells nice.”

“No she doesn’t, she smells of human.”

“I think humans smell nice, then.”

“I want to braid her hair TOO!”

Elain is turned this way and that, prodded by tiny hands getting more and more curious. Pinlike fingers prod at hems and hairlines, the fluttering of wings brushing Elain’s cheeks and making her flinch.

“Do you think the king knows she’s here?”

“Marigold, stop _wailing_ , for mercy’s sake.”

“Do you think we should tell him?”

“He’d probably turn you into a frog for having a big mouth, and you’d deserve it.”

The rising din of tinny voices becomes too much, and Elain squirms out of their reach, trying to extricate herself without hurting any of them.

“The king does know I’m here, thank you,” Elain says sharply. Faeries like this were supposed to be sweet, benevolent things, prettily winged storybook illustrations, not mindless little creatures who discussed eating you. “I’m trying to get to the center of the Labyinth to rescue my sisters from him.”

This summons the biggest cascade of laughs yet from the faeries, who flutter and swoop and dip in the air around Elain’s head, heedless.

“Oh, you’ll never get half that far!” The first faerie cackles, completing a lopsided figure eight in the air.

Elain tries and fails to not let the statement deflate her, just a little. “Why do you say that?”

“You’ll be squished or starved or drowned or boiled or burned first!” She says, a maniacal sing-song.

“No human’s ever made it to the castle,” another says gleefully.

Elain feels chill beneath her cloak. Just how many humans have there been? How many people has the Goblin King lured here to die those horrible deaths? “Nevertheless, I’m afraid I have to try,” she says, turning to eye where the wall continues. “Now, if any of you would be so kind to tell me, if I continue on this way, will I find a door or not?”

Silence from the faeries. Not even laughter, or the beat of their wings. Elain turns back to find them vanished, only empty air where they fluttered. Her heart drops into her shoes.

“Hello?” She asks the empty air, looking around uselessly. Her hand goes to worry at the hourglass necklace, as though it might save her from the sudden whims of this place. Perhaps the faeries weren’t real at all, only an illusion—

“I apologize. I might have frightened them away.”

Elain gives a small start in surprise, biting down on a yelp. The voice is nothing like the faeries’, a man’s voice, she thinks. But it comes from nowhere; Elain turns around uselessly trying to find a source. “Who said that?!”

“Here.”

But there’s nothing _here_ , or anywhere, just the crumbling stones and a few scrubby trees and her own shadow, crisply thrown on the wall behind her.

“Where’s _here_?” Elain asks, trying to sound less alarmed than she is and failing.

“Behind you.”

“But there’s—”

Elain turns, but her shadow does not.

She freezes, staring at it. The shadow raises a hand to give the tiniest wave, and Elain lets out a little squeak and jumps backwards.

“I hope I haven’t frightened you as well,” the shadow says a touch sheepishly, not Elain’s shadow at all but its own entity.

“I—” Elain stammers, trying to recover herself, “I’m a bit started, is all. Shadows don’t talk where I come from.”

“Most of them don’t talk here either. I’m an exception, not the rule.”

On closer inspection, it’s silly that Elain ever thought it her own shadow. He’s taller than her, broad-shouldered, a slightly blurry silhouette of a man as though one were standing in front of the wall with a strong light thrown on him.

“I heard what you said to the faeries,” the shadow goes on, “About rescuing your sisters.”

“Oh. Yes,” Elain says lamely. It’s very strange to converse with a creature with no face, no features or expressions from which to divine personality and intent. Nesta would probably like him, she always found such nuance pointless. The frustration of the faeries dismissal comes surging back up Elain’s throat. “Are you going to tell me it’s a futile endeavor as well?”

“Not at all. I won’t even list the gruesome ways you might die.”

She feels a smile tug at her lips despite herself. “I’m Elain, by the way,” she says, and since you can’t shake a shadow’s hand, she dips a tiny curtsy.

“My name is Azriel,” says the shadow, bowing in return.

“Well, Lord Azriel, I don’t suppose you know where I could find a door into the Labyrinth?”

He laughs, a deep, melodic thing. “I’m not a Lord, my Lady. And I’m afraid there are no doors, not in the sense you mean.”

Elain’s heart sinks to her toes. “Then how in the world do people get inside?”

“Different ways. The faeries fly over. The animals burrow under. Those with magic use that in some capacity.” He pauses. “Of course, not many people go in or out of the Labyrinth at all.”

Elain eyes the wall again, picking over every crack, every missing stone, the patch of flower-studded ivy that grows up it nearby, its blooms tightly closed. “How do _you_ go in and out, then?” She asks Azriel.

He gives a motion she can’t quite make out, inclining his head, perhaps, and moves— not as a human would move, not walking, but as though the nonexistent light source that casts him is thrown to the side. He bleeds across the wall, ephemeral, melting into a shadow cast in the wall’s uneven side, and then into the crack.

Elain moves to peer into it. It’s just large enough to give her a glimpse of whatever lies beyond, and she can see Azriel appear on the opposite wall. He rushes back, then, like a dark wind, appearing from a different break in the wall and coming into focus next to Elain before she’s even stepped back again.

“That’s a very nice trick,” Elain says, blinking faintly. How long will it take in this place until little magics stop alarming her? “But I don’t think I can do that.”

There might be a smile in his voice when he speaks again. “I would imagine not. But that’s no reason to give up hope.” He reaches out a shadow-arm, raises it so that it passes over the clusters of closed flowers that grow from the crumbling wall. They open at the disturbance of their light, one by one, and the unfolding petals don’t revealing pollen-filled centers but _eyes_ , glistening orbs with irises of blues and browns and greens that follow the shadow’s movement. Elain gasps.

The eye-flowers slowly start to close again, sleepily, and Azriel’s arm drops. “Nothing is what it seems, here. Not even walls.”

Elain’s skin prickles at the words. “What do you mean by that?”

“I can’t give you specific instructions to get in. I doubt anyone can. But I’m certain it’s possible, if you find your own way through.”

“Do you have any… suggestions, then?” Elain hedges, very unsure if she likes this turn of events.

The shadow seems to shrug. “Use your strengths.”

He’s sincere, the shadow, not a shred of humor or dismissiveness to his voice. Not that that helps much. Her strengths. What in the world are Elain’s strengths? She can’t _be pretty_ at a wall, she can’t diffuse her family’s bad moods at a wall. She could make an attempt to _garden_ the wall, she supposes, but those eye-flowers certainly aren’t anything she’s planted before.

“I’m afraid I have to go,” Azriel says, and his shadow starts to fade a little. “But I wish you every luck in the world with finding your sisters.”

“Wait!” Elain blurts, panic overtaking her at the thought of the only reasonable person in this wasteland leaving her. He pauses, and Elain immediately feels guilty. She has no good reason to ask him to stay, surely he has… shadowey obligations elsewhere.

She feels as though she should ask him one last question while she has the chance, but nothing comes to her, mind still reeling with new information. “Thank you,” Elain says instead, “for helping me.”

He bows again. “My pleasure, Lady Elain.”

And then he’s gone, bled across the wall and beyond.

The wind whispers faintly in the trees, and Elain examines the wall yet again with a huff. _Find your own way through._

“Please let me in?” she asks it.

Nothing happens except the faintest chirp of birds in the distance, and the feeling of ridiculousness that comes over her is swift and mortifying. Elain groans and turns her back to the wall, slumping against it in defeat. This is nonsense. She was harassed by a man in very tight pants, accosted by faeries, and given ambiguous advice about getting through an apparently magic wall by a sentient _shadow_. What is she doing?

She can’t help but think that her sisters would already be past this point. Feyre would have climbed the damn thing, or known the right way to make the faeries help her. Nesta would have just glared at the wall and it would have parted like curtains for her.

“Use my strengths,” Elain says aloud. “I don’t have any strengths.”

The wall at her back, unsurprisingly, still doesn’t respond.

That’s always been Elain’s place in the family, though. The one who _isn’t_ strong. Necessarily so, since her sisters have nearly more strength between them than a family can handle.

 _“Feyre keeps our stomachs fed, Nesta our minds sharp. But you, my dear, keep our hearts light,”_ her father had once said, on a rare occasion it was just the two of them in the cabin, Nesta out selling one of Feyre’s pelts at market and Feyre herself out hunting.

Elain smiled from her spot by the fire, where she picked at a piece of embroidery. _“That’s very sweet of you, papa.”_

Her thanks was sincere, but the sentiment wasn’t: Elain knows she is useless. It doesn’t truly bother her, not a fraction of the way it bothers Nesta, seethes under her skin, but still—

The firelight danced in his eyes, surprisingly clear that day when they were so often cloudy. _“You keep faith for us, Elain. That is no small thing in this world.”_

Faith.

Elain tips her head back against the wall.

“I believe that one day things will get better for us,” Elain whispers, “That we won’t be cold and hungry and unkind to each other. And I believe that first, I am going to rescue my sisters from the labyrinth.” She stands, because it’s true: she does believe those things, no matter how hard some days get or how frustrated she is right now.

“And I also believe,” Elain walks about a dozen paces away from the wall and then turns back to face it. “That I will get past this wall.”

She takes a step, and another, and another, slowly but smoothly walking towards the wall, and firmly closes her eyes.

Her hands itch to go out in front of her, feel her way, but that would defeat the purpose: _faith_ that she’ll be let in, that she won’t _need_ her hands to catch her. So blindly she walks. It’s stupid, there’s no way around the fact that this is a stupid idea that by all accounts shouldn’t work, but Elain quashes the thought. She walks and fights back the flinch that comes when her mind tells her she should be about to crash into stone—

But she keeps going, and she doesn’t. Heart in her throat, Elain goes until she is certain, _certain_ , that except by some trick of magic, she should have hit the wall by now, and stops. She opens her eyes.

Before her is a passageway that breaks off into a dozen different paths, and _behind_ her is the wretched wall. The wall that let her pass through it.

Elain lets out a shriek of exultation, one hand going to her mouth and the other to touch the very solid, unyeilding stone, to confirm the magic for herself. It worked, it _worked_ , she’s beaten the first test. The surge of relief almost dizzying, and she laughs; She _can_ do this, she can learn to play by the Labyrinth’s rules and win. The paths before her twist in suspiciously, the ground uneven and treacherous, but Elain is not afraid. _Nesta_ , she thinks _, Feyre, hold on, I’m coming._

Elain takes three steps forward, and the ground gives out underneath her with a sickening crumble, darkness coming up to swallow her so quickly there’s not even time to scream.

 

***

 

The fall ends abruptly, blackness and rope that burns her skin, and Elain tries to recover the breath stolen from her, legs flailing as she tries to right herself.

“Well, look at that.” A voice snakes over her like a physical presence, rank and low, and Elain pants as she tries to get upright— but she can’t, she’s suspended in some kind of net, gradually illuminated as her eyes adjust to the dim light.

“And what have you brought me to eat?” The voice coos nastily, closer now, and Elain can make out a dark hooded figure approach her. “Such a squirmy one.”

“St-stay back!” She whimpers, but the creature’s clammy, thin hand darts between the ropes and grabs her chin tightly, tilts her head up to examine her.

Elain only fails to scream because there’s suddenly not enough air in her lungs for it. Her captor’s face is not even a monster, but a monster’s corpse, inhuman and shriveled, the greyish remnants of skin clinging to a skull-like form with deep black holes for eyes, and wicked teeth that part to hiss at her.

The creature snatches its hand back from Elain. “Human,” it snarls, “A human in my net.”

“I--yes,” Elain stammers, heart beating furiously as she tries to keep away from the thing. “Yes, I’m a human.”

“There has not been a human in this labyrinth for many years.” It rubs the hand that touched her as though she’s infected it, those dark pits peering at Elain curiously. “Why have you come here?”

“I’m here to rescue my sisters,” Elain gets out, finally balancing herself somewhat upright, holding on to the netting. Directly below her, a dark hole yawns; she tries not to look at it. “From the Goblin king.”

It throws its head back and laughs, a terrible rasping thing, a dying wail. “Oh, precious human child. He’ll never let you win; he never does.”

But Elain is not listening. She is talking in the cavernous space behind the creature, finally. It must be its home; there’s a cot-like surface and a great cauldron in the middle that steams faintly, tools and buckets and random other items strewn about around it. But hung with care on crisscrossing ropes are articles of clothing, perfectly preserved, most of them quite fine: tunics and pants, dresses and cloaks, with no thought to gender or cut. It gives the place the aura of madness; this is not a wardrobe, this is a _collection_ , cultivated and obsessively maintained.

“Best to give up now,” It says, and cackles again. “And die a better death than what awaits you.”

“I know what you are!” Elain yelps, the rush of association alleviating her fear, if only for a moment. “From the stories. You’re the Suriel.”

It tilts its skeletal head at her, doglike, and its voice is more flat than curious when it says, “You know of my kind.”

Elain feverishly hopes that that doesn’t offend it. “Yes, my… my mother told me about you. You’ll answer a question for anyone who manages to catch you, or anyone who—” Elain’s eyes go to the hanging garments. “Leaves you tribute.”

The Suriel chuckles darkly. “Once, yes. It’s been a long time since anyone did that.”

The Suriel, in the stories, possessed a degree of omnipotence, could answer any question put to them, mundane or magical. Who wouldn’t want access to that? Elain scrambles for the clasp of her cloak.

“I will! Here, here’s my cape in exchange for a question.”

The thing howls with laughter a second time, and Elain’s cheeks flame. Of course it wouldn’t want anything of hers— all her clothes are worn thin, dirty and mouse-eaten.

“I’ll make a deal with you, human. Keep your cloak,” It says sharply, amusement lining what passes for its mouth, the shriveled skin clinging to the gums of its teeth. “I am not without charity; I will answer a question for you. But in return, you must guess the answer to a riddle I pose correctly. If you guess correctly, I’ll pull you out of there and let you go.”

Elain has heard all her life of fae trickery, and this sends tremors down her spine, a tingling foreboding that runs all the way to her fingertips. “And if I don’t?”

Its horrible mouth grins, even more rows of gnarled yellow fangs exposed. “Luckily for you, child, I can’t eat humans, so I suppose I’ll let you finish your fall.”

The dark hole looms below her threateningly. Elain’s mouth goes dry. “What’s down there?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Elain expected a terrible creature to devour her, or perhaps an acid lake to burn her flesh from her bones. _Nothing_ doesn’t sound bad at all, compared to that.

“Pits of Naught, they’re called; the Labyrinth’s full of them. There’s nothing in them at all, including no way out, and anything that falls into them is soon _nothing_ too.” It gives a little cackle, the sound like logs snapping in a fire. “But if you guess the riddle correctly, you needn’t worry about that. Do we have a bargain?”

Elain doesn’t like something about the way it says the world _bargain_ ; like a slimy thing. But there’s little to do but agree. “Yes.”

Something prickles hotly at Elain’s elbow, just strong enough to make her gasp and twist; she shoves up her sleeve to see a tattoo blooming on the skin there.

“Don’t mind that,” the creature says. “One way or the other, it won’t last long.”

But Elain gapes at the mark as it swirls outward like ink dropped into water, symbols that look vaguely like letters encircling her arm in thin bands, one just above her elbow and one just below it.

She shakes her head in confusion. “What—”

“Merely a side effect of faerie bargains. A reminder of promises to be kept.” The thing’s claws click together impatiently. “Ask your question.”

She felt no such thing when she agreed to the Goblin King’s terms, Elain realises coldly. If a magic bargain is the faerie version of a binding agreement— is her quest to rescue Nesta and Feyre not bound by one? Can he, having power she does not, tamper with the terms as he wishes, then? The thought unnerves her, but there is no time to dwell on it.

“Can you tell me how to get to the center of the Labyrinth?” She asks, breathless.

The creature throws its head back and laughs, a choking, ugly thing. When it finishes, it looks straight at her, dead white eyes glinting. “Yes.”

It does not continue, and horror washes over Elain.

“Wait!” she cries, as the thing laughs again, “Wait, that’s not what I meant, I just didn’t phrase it right— I was asking you _how_ to— ”

“It is not my fault you wasted your question, human,” it croons with amusement, “Consider this a lesson in choosing your worlds carefully.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Nothing here is,” it responds, teeth snapping shut with a decisive clack. “Now, listen carefully to the riddle, because I won’t repeat it.

“What is it men love more than life,

Fear more than death or mortal strife?

The poor man has, the rich require,

What is the contented man's desire?

The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,

And all men carry to their graves.”

Panic squeezes Elain’s throat, as she reels from her mistake and half the riddle falls out of her head immediately. “I— what?”

“You heard it, human. What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know!” The burn of tears begins in Elain’s eyes. “Please, give me a moment to think!”

Men fear and adore it, a poor man has it— men carry it to their graves? It must be something abstract. Life? Love? There was something about spending, is it money? Is it just wealth as a concept?

The Suriel’s eye-holes grow wider with glee. “Your time is running out, human.”

“I’m thinking,” Elain blurts frantically.

What would Feyre do? Try to think of something else, something less vague, of—letters in the words, or body parts, or surprising elements. Elain knows enough of riddles to know their answers are the unexpected. But what do the rich need, if not something with wealth? Manners? Moderation? Humility?

“Your time’s up,” the creature says gleefully, running its long, cracked nails across the cave wall. The clacking sound makes Elain’s heart jump. “What is the answer, human?”

“I—” Elain flounders. None of answers she came up with make sense. Nothing makes sense for all the statements, they contradict each other. She blurts one of her answers at random. “Love?”

The terrible grin that splits the creature’s face makes horror bloom in her stomach.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” it cackles. “No surprise.”

“Wait!” Elain cries, as it reaches for the rope that suspends the net, and her in it. “Wait, please, I can figure it out, I’m certain—”

“Goodbye, human,” It says, untying the knot. “It’s a pity you didn’t last long enough to give our king more trouble.”

“Wait—!”

But the rope falls free, and Elain plummets, her plea turning into a scream. The fall isn’t long but her landing is harsh, knocking the wind from her lungs and sending pain radiating through the hip and shoulder that take most of the blow. Elain coughs for air, shoving her way free from the net that ensnares her.

Again the sound of the Suriel laughing, from above now.

“ _Nothing_ , human!” It calls down from the circle of dim light far above her now. “The answer to the riddle is _nothing_.”

What a poor man has, what the content one desires. What’s in this hole. _Nothing_.

Elain feels so hopelessly bound up by her own stupidity that she's too suffocated to respond, to inept to even summon a reply but the burgeoning tears in her throat. The suriel laughs a final, terrible time and a cover clangs into place on the opening, leaving Elain totally alone, surrounded by _nothing_.

Elain’s face crumples and she starts to cry.

 

***

 

Lucien’s court carries on around him, tittering and squabbling like they always do. Goblins and fae, faeries and gnomes, creatures with no names or kin, a maddening cacophony of triviality. Lucien lets the chaos run off him like rainwater. His focus is entirely elsewhere, cast far across the labyrinth, in one of the pits of naught.

She should never have made it this far.

He taps his riding crop absently across his boot, posture ostensibly cavalier as he reclines on his throne. If the knuckles of his free right hand grip the armrest so tightly it threatens to snap, it is the only outward sign that something is amiss with the Labyrinth’s lord king.

She wasn’t _supposed_ to make it through the damn wall. She was supposed to run around for a few hours, get harassed by the harmless denizens that roamed that far out, and then summon him, crying, to give up or beg him or—

The armrest cracks under his tense grip. The sound attracts the questioning looks of a few goblins; Lucien fixes them with a glare that has them quickly busying themselves with whatever insipid conversations they were having before. He’s thrown enough insolent courtiers in the swamp over the years that the threat is implicit.

Of course, the threat was apparently not implicit enough to deter the Shadow from helping Elain. But that was easily remedied.

The double doors at the base of the room open just enough, with a great creaking groan of the hinges, to let a little guardgoblin through. He bows low enough that his nose, long and weedy like a carrot, nearly brushes the floor. “Your majesty, the human prisoners, as you requested.”

The energy of the court turns like the sun going behind clouds, suddenly more subdued and more thrilling all at once as creatures murmur and jostle for views of the doors. None of them have seen a human in decades.

Lucien flexes the fingers of his right hand. “It’s about time.”

The double doors open, and the crowd parts for the high fae guards and their quarry. Lucien feels his face carve into a smile as two sets of eyes find him in the chaos, above it all.

Feyre and Nesta Archeron are prodded forward by the rusted spears of their jailers, wrists bound and mouths gagged. Nesta practically vibrates with a trembling fury, eyes locked on Lucien, while Feyre’s eyes dart: to the guards, to the courtiers that whisper and crane their necks at her, to the exits. Brave and clever in turn, not that it will do them a drop of good.

“Welcome,” Lucien says, the world reverberating off the stone walls, “To my court. So few humans ever see the center of the Labyrinth; I hope you feel as honored as you should by my magnanimity.”

Snickers from their spectators. Rage flashes in Nesta’s eyes and the two guards on either side grab her arms, keep her from lurching forward like she’d fight Lucien hands tied together or no. It makes him smirk.

“Please forgive my subjects,” he says, letting his voice drip with false graciousness, “They tend to carry out kidnapping with excessive enthusiasm, but you’re my guests, not my prisoners. The gags won’t be necessary.” He gestures at the guards.

“What have you done with Elain?!” Nesta predictably demands with the first breath she takes. “Where is she?”

Lucien clicks his tongue. “So accusatory. Is this how humans respond to hospitality? No wonder we got rid of you all.”

“Where _is_ she?!” Nesta repeats, a snarl. A guard is forced to wrap his arms around her waist to keep her in place. “If you hurt her—”

“I’ve done nothing to Elain she didn’t ask me to do,” Lucien says with a placid smile, for the specific purpose of watching Nesta turn a whole sunrise’s worth of furious colors. His court titters appropriately.

“Where are we?” Feyre asks, voice dark and quick, before Nesta can curse him into another realm. “What is this place? And who are you?”

If Nesta is barely-contained rage, Feyre is brewing contempt, studying Lucien like prey she intends to bring down silent and quick. Like the sun and moon, these sisters, and so little fear between them; he’ll have to thank Elain at some point for giving him such entertaining collateral. The thought of her anger at it cheers him considerably.

“I told you, Feyre,” he says simply. Pointedly. “This is the center of the Labyrinth. The castle beyond the Goblin City.”

Feyre has gone very still. “You know our names.”

“I know many things.”

Her response is slow to come, carefully worded. “That hardly seems fair, since we don’t know who you are.”

“I’m disappointed the two of you haven’t figured it out yet.” He chuckles, taps the crop against his thigh. “Elain guessed immediately.”

Nesta’s brows knit together in dawning horror, finally. Finally. He never gets tired of this, the realization. Elain’s is still sweet on his tongue, to have two in one day is practically overindulgence.

“You’re him,” Nesta breathes, “From the stories. You’re the Goblin King.”

Lucien beams at her, even as Feyre looks between them both, confused.

“Ruler of the Labyrinth, master of the exiled and forgotten, tormentor of mortals, lord of chaos and rot,” Lucien recites, rising from his throne. He gives Feyre a beatific smile, palming the crop still in his hands. “And yes, King of Goblins. In the flesh.”

Feyre’s throat bobs, her resolve wavering. “Why have you taken us? And what have you done with Elain?”

Lucien tilts his head at her lazily, in ho hurry to answer.

“I took the two of you,” he drawls, as though explaining it to a child, “Because your sweet sister asked me to.”

He desends the dias one slow step at a time, savoring the confusion that dawns on their faces, the disbelief, the—

“What are you talking about,” Nesta says hatefully. “She would never.”

Lucien comes to a stop before them, gives her a patronizing smile. “Oh, but she did.” The guards once again are forced to hold Nesta back as she starts for him in fury. “And it’s just so difficult to say no to that pretty face of hers.”

“Where is she, you monster?!” Nesta all but screams. Lucien throws his head back and laughs at the show she puts on, her gold-brown hair escaping the braided crown atop her head, face bright red as she kicks and writhes, one guard wrapping an arm around her waist in an attempt to hold her.

“You’re lying!” Feyre yells, over the sound of the court mocking her sister.

Lucien’s focus whips to her, hard and cold, and she looks taken aback by the faerie speed of the change. Let her. It’s not his business to make himself more human for the ease of silly little mortals.

“Am I?” He asks, each syllable an arrow to a target. She does not cower, but fear shines in her eyes as he steps toward her, until they are not an arm’s length apart.

“Is it so hard to believe,” he says, so softly it might be mistaken for sweet, but surely Feyre knows better, “That the two of you might have pushed even sweet Elain to the point of wanting a reprieve? Your arguments can be—”

“You’re a monster,” Nesta spits, no longer fighting her guards but shaking, slightly, with the force of her anger. “You’re a sick, twisted creature and if you don’t give Elain back to us right now I swear I’ll burn this whole castle to th—”

Suddenly words stop coming out of Nesta’s mouth. She gapes, lips forming letters that come out as empty air.

“It’s not polite to interrupt, Nesta,” Lucien says with perfect coldness.

She screams soundlessly, clawing at her throat and yelling a thousand profane things at him in perfect silence. It’s terribly satisfying.

“Undo it, please,” Feyre asks, voice trembling. She’s properly afraid now, as Lucien turns back to her, hunter’s stoic strength fled her in the face of magic. “Please, she didn’t mean anything.”

“It’ll wear off,” Lucien says breezily, flashing Feyre a smile. “And if she learns her lesson, I won’t have to do it again.”

Unshed tears shine in Feyre’s eyes. “Lesson?”

“Of course. I can’t have members of my court undermining my authority, it looks terrible to all the other hellscape prison-mazes in Prythian.”

Lucien laughs a little at his own joke— as if there are other places in Prythian like the Labyrinth, as if anyone at all would deign to care about him or what goes on in this parody of a true court— but Feyre doesn’t seem to understand it is one, looking from an increasingly panicked Nesta to him and back.

“Please,” Feyre whispers, “I don’t understand what you want with us, just— just let us see Elain.”

He must look too pleased at this request, because alarm flashes across Feyre’s face.

“Well, of course,” he purrs, “All you had to do was ask nicely.”

He places the tip of the crop beneath her chin and forces her head up.

His timing in requesting to speak with them had not been incidental, and here is the payoff: The entire ceiling becomes vague and foggy, and with the crackle of magic, Elain’s murky image is painted upon it as she is, miles away, in the pit of Naught. Feyre gasps. The gathered court cackles and hoots at this new entertainment

Elain is curled on her side in the empty pit, threadbare cloak drawn tight around her shoulders as she cries softly. Half-dried tears streak her face, eyes red and swollen. It couldn’t be a more perfectly pitiful image.

“Elain!” Feyre yells.

“She can’t hear you,” Lucien says, stepping away from her to better survey the entire image. “We can see her, but she can’t see us.”

“ _Feyre_ ,” Elain chokes, a sad little prayer, “ _Nesta, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to_.” Another sob claws its way from her chest, the sound swallowed by the uproarious laughter of Lucien’s subjects.

Lucien means to join them, but his laugh sticks in his throat.

The projection shimmers and Elain wipes away a tear clumsily. _“I’m coming to save you both,”_ Elain promises, voice wavering. _“I am. I_ am _.”_

Such optimism. Such sweetness. In defeat she despairs for her sisters, not herself. He grips the crop in both hands, almost unconsciously.

He means to draw this out, revel in Elain’s suffering and her sisters’ pain, but he’s suddenly tired of the image, restless; he doesn’t want to watch any more. At his whim the vision dissipates like smoke, the goblins and fae jeering their disappointment. Lucien lets them as he returns to his throne.

“Nesta’s right,” Feyre says thickly, her voice gaining power as she speaks. “You’re a monster. You go around twisting people’s wants to torment them, to make them run your faerie gauntlet so you can laugh as your monsters destroy them.”

Lucien hums as he sits. “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds quite unflattering.”

“What does she mean she’s going to save us?!”

He sighs, swishes the crop through the air absently. “Because I am not as ungenerous as you make me out to be, I’ve given Elain three days to find her way here and rescue you.” He gives them a condescending smile, but can’t summon any real enthusiasm to back it up— the whole encounter has turned to ash in his mouth, infuriatingly, his glee over tormenting them vanished. “ _When_ she fails, the two of you will become a part of my court forever.”

“What?!” Feyre cries, as Nesta’s eyes go wide. He gestures at the guards, and the doors they entered from begin creaking open again.

“If I were you,” he says simply, as Feyre struggles against the guards who are pulling her away, “I would spend that time contemplating what kind of creature you’d like to be turned into. Because if you don’t have one in mind it’ll just be a goblin, and no one really wants that.”

“You can’t do this!” She screams, “Let us go!”

Lucien just tips his head back comfortably, the goblins and lesser fae shoving and jeering at the girls as guards drag them from the dias.

“Oh,” he adds, “And Nesta, you can speak again.”

He laughs as the door closes behind them, and her screamed curses are audible even though it.

 

***

 

The first thing Nesta does in the cell is rail against the iron door, beating her arms against it and clawing until she bleeds. Her words turn into an incoherent, raw babble of threats and Elain’s name; a mad litany, a curse on this entire wretched castle.

“Nesta,” Feyre says raggedly, although it’s hard to stop her when Nesta looks how Feyre feels, like a raging, terrified mess. “Nesta,” She tries again, and pulls her away from the door by her shoulders. “Stop. You have to stop,” Feyre says, her own voice thick.

Nesta trembles under her hands. “He took her.” She blinks rapidly, face red and the wet tracks of tears smeared across her cheeks. “He took Elain and it’s our _fault—_ ”

She fractures on the word, not into a sob but something worse, a kind of low howl that has her shoulders drawing in and her face crumpling.

“I know, Nesta, I know—” Feyre tries to sooth her, hands tightening on Nesta’s shoulders, but when has Feyre ever been good at soothing? “Listen, I know. But we have to stay calm, alright? This is what he wants. We can’t give him what he wants.”

 _He_ . The Goblin King. The title rings the faintest of bells in Feyre’s memory, makes her think of candlelight and voluminous gold skirts. He looks High Fae, as best she can tell, human but not, beautiful except for that gold eye, but he must be something even worse to do this, to toy with them so cruelly. To toy with _Elain_ , sweet and hapless as she is. Feyre’s stomach twists.

“We have to keep it together,” Feyre goes on, although the encouragement feels false and heavy in her own mouth. “For Elain.”

Nesta has gone still, panic and rage subsided, hardened. Feyre does not relinquish her shoulders.

“You’re right,” Nesta says, breathing labored, and Feyre can hear her sister’s iron control creeping back in. “You’re right.”

Nesta lifts her iron-grey gaze to Feyre’s, and with her wild eyes and her hair half unbound, she looks almost as fae as the creatures in that throne room were. “We are going to stay calm. Because we’re going to get out of here and get our sister back, and the Goblin King can go fuck himself.”

 

 this fic is also on [tumblr](https://valamerys.tumblr.com/post/163702553930/through-dangers-untold-ch-2-elucien-labyrinth-au)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, Azriel will be back! I hope you all like what I did to him >:)


	3. Chapter 3

Elain cries until her tears are spent, whispers _I’m sorry_ s into the nothingness she’s trapped in until her eyes are too raw to continue. The Pit of Naught, strangely, is not dark, like Elain had first thought; from the bottom, it’s a dim murky greyishness. Darkness would at least be _something_ , as would light, and the pit is truly full of _nothing_ , neither walls nor ceiling nor floor. Elain almost might be floating if she didn’t feel gravity still weigh on her a hundredfold.

Nesta and Feyre deserve a better sister, one more like them, braver and smarter and not stupid enough to get herself captured by a monster and left to rot in a hole. The wasted question burns at the back of her throat. All the stories she’s heard of faerie trickery, of the importance of being careful and not trusting them, ever, and still superficial benevolence had been enough to make her forget herself.

She doesn’t know how long she lies there, feeling terrible. It’s entirely possible that _time_ doesn’t exist in the pit either, although Elain is too afraid to check the hourglass around her neck and see.

Eventually she forces herself up— lying there feeling sorry for herself won’t free anyone, and she’s going to win, she’s going to beat this, she _is—_ and checks her surroundings, for a door, for anything. But she wanders without ever hitting walls, seeing absolutely, characteristically, nothing. A room can be broken out of, but this is not a room.

Her tears are threatening to return when something moves in the corner of her eye. Elain stiffens, but before fear can take root, the form slowly materializes: a shadowed silhouette.

“Oh, it’s you!” Elain says, relief flooding her. “My shadow friend.”

He inclines his head, and Elain hears a smile in his voice. “Hello again, Lady Elain.”

She giggles, wiping ungracefully at her snotty nose. It’s incredibly heartening to see a friendly face— or even techincal lack thereof. “What are you doing down here?”

“I admit, I got worried about you. Humans aren’t well-equipped to navigate the labyrinth, I should have been of more help to you to begin with.”

“Nonsense, you were very helpful,” Elain says. She glances at the ceiling. “It’s that thing up there that wasn’t.”

“Nasty creature, the Suriel,” Azriel says, his outline craning to follow Elain’s gaze upward. “And still more reasonable than some.”

Elain shudders at the memory of its bony fingers, tries to banish the thought. “It’s very kind of you to come back and check on me. I don’t suppose you know where the door is?”

It’s a mystery how he got down here in the first place. Or knew where she was, for that matter— but this place is full of so many strange magics, better not to question the ones that help her.

“No doors, I’m afraid,” Azriel says, “But we shadows are brothers to Nothing, so I find it easy enough to ask it for favors.” He extends a blurry arm, and at the tips of his fingers, a tiny hole appears in the nothing, light streaming through it. The hand comes up, and the Nothing is waved away like smoke, leaving a roughly door-shaped hole into a placid-looking garden.

Elain laughs. “Thank you! That’s a wonderful trick, are all shadows so talented?”

“It’s nothing,” Azriel says with a bashful shrug.

“It’s not nothing, you’re my savior!” Elain says happily as she steps out into the sun, relishing even the taste of air on her tongue. She twirls once with frenzied relief.

The Pit of Naught is vanished from sight, tall thorny hedge walls surrounding them in every direction; Azriel is situated on one of them, his edges broken up by leaves. How long would it have taken the Nothing to break her down to the same if he hadn’t come along?

“Thank you,” she says sincerely. If he had a body, she’d hug him. “Really. I wish there was something I could do for you in return.”

He gives a little bow. “The pleasure of helping someone who’s a thorn in the king’s side is pleasure enough for payment, truly.”

Elain faces the labyrinth, faking more confidence than she feels. “I’m… sure I can find my own way from here.”

“I don’t doubt it, but if you would like my help, I’m happy to guide you for a bit. I’ve spent ages wandering the corridors; it would be ungenerous of me not to share the knowledge I’ve gained.”

Elain’s hand goes to her heart. “Oh, would you? That would be so helpful.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Azriel says simply, gliding from the hedge to an ivy-eaten wall across from her. “This way, my lady.”

“Thank you,” Elain says again, happily setting off after the darting shadow.

He leads her this way and that, past strange plants and what seem like temple ruins, cracked pillars and the remnants of tall arched doorways. Elain has a hard enough time keeping her footing on the uneven stones and terrain, and Azriel seems content with silence— makes sense, for a shadow— so a time passes without speaking. But as Elain dwells on their earlier interaction, she wonders.

“You said—“ Elain ventures, picking her way over the roots of an enormous tree that nearly blots out the dusty sky above them, “— something about the king. Do you not like him either?”

“He’s not generally well-liked.”

“I asked whether or not _you_ liked him,” she presses gently.

Azriel takes a moment to respond. “I have a number of grievances with him, yes.”

“Then you should stay with me all the way to the castle at the center of the Labyrinth,” Elain says, feeling bold as they make a sharp left turn. “So we can both see how angry he is when I beat him.”

“I would be careful of talk like that.” There’s a chuckle in Azriel’s voice despite the words. “I don’t doubt he can hear us.”

“Let him! I don’t care if he knows I think he’s a rotten, cruel, nasty piece of—” A brick crumbles beneath Elain’s foot, and she stumbles forward with a yelp, landing awkwardly on her hands.

A single laugh escapes Azriel, before his hand flies to his mouth to muffle it, and Elain huffs. “What kind of _abominable_ ego—”

“Perhaps we should talk about something else, before something heavy drops out of the sky and kills you,” Azriel suggests, as Elain brushes herself off.

“What would you like to talk about?”

Around them, the shadows of encroaching evening grow long, the whole Labyrinth taking on a rich tawny color. Where they are now would be a lovely garden, really, if it weren’t so badly maintained, everything broken and threateningly overgrown, twisted in on itself as it winds here and there into corridors.

Azriel hesitates, and when he speaks, the question is oddly weighted, in that dark voice of his. “What’s your world like?”

Elain frowns. Whatever question she expected, it wasn’t that. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Azriel seems uncharacteristically at a loss. “I mean, are humans… happy, where you’re from? Are the mortal lands prosperous?”

Elain turns to walk slowly down the path again, brow creasing. “Not terribly, I don’t think. Although I don’t have much to compare it to. I haven’t left our village since I was very young, and I’ve never seen the continent.”

“But you and your sisters, you’re happy? Free?”

He seems to be getting at something Elain can’t fathom. “Not as happy as we’d like,” she says diplomatically. “We’re very poor. Feyre hunts to feed us, and my father’s injury means he can’t work.”

The simplest, most cut-and-dried explanation of their living circumstances. It stings her heart a little to lay it out so flatly, to cut around the way she feels living in that shack day after day.

“But you are free.”

Elain’s not sure what he means by that. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Azriel says something else, but Elain’s attention is diverted, a call coming from somewhere in the distance.

“Did you hear that?” Elain asks.

“Hear what?”

It repeats, a little louder. It sounds like—

“That,” Elain says, urgency creeping into her voice, and she starts off down the path towards it. She hears it again, and this time it’s clearer:

_Elain!_

It’s Nesta’s voice.

“Nesta!” Elain calls, heart leaping into her throat. “Nesta, is that you?!”

“Elain, who are you talking to?!” Azriel asks, following her now, gliding easily as she stumbles along the path.

“That’s one of my sisters, she’s calling me— Nesta!”

“I don’t hear anything.”

 _Elain!_ It comes from behind her this time, clear and loud.

“That’s Feyre!” Elain turns, caught between two directions. “Feyre, where are you, I’m coming!”

“Elain,” Azriel says, more firmly, “You’re not hearing your sisters.”

 _Elain! Elain! Elain!_ The directions change, the volume varies, and Elain is caught twisting this way and that, panic warring in her chest.

“Nesta! Feyre!” she calls, voice trembling.

“Elain,” Azriel says again, intently, “Listen to me. It’s the labyrinth messing with your head. They’re not really here. You know that.”

Elain clamps her hands over her ears in an attempt to block it out, as the calls of her name come faster, more plaintive, more wheedling— Azriel is right, it’s not her sisters, of course it’s not, but it still feels like a kick in the chest to hear them call her name, plead for her help, and not answer them.

“I know,” she gets out, the sound of her own voice muffled with her hands over her ears. “I know it’s not. How do I make it stop?”

Azriel swears. “I know someone who might be able to help, alright? Can you keep following me?” She can only barely hear him, but she nods.

Azriel leads them, moving fast— if before he downplayed his navigational skills for Elain’s comfort, he doesn’t now, darting as quickly as he can through cracks in walls and under branches, nimble as a spider. Elain scrambles to keep up, has to take her hands away from her ears for balance: the voices grow more numerous and more annoyed until her skull rings painfully with the reverberation of her sisters’ false voices. A whimper slips out, and Az pauses to look back at her.

“Almost there, Elain. Hang on.”

The stone ground gives way to something mossier, the bodies of trees warped to form the impenetrable walls of the labyrinth as foliage towers overhead. The long shadows seem to make Az faster, like a fish in a rushing stream. He leads them to fat tree with a great knot in the center, and if Elain is hearing correctly over the din of _ElainElainElain_ in her ears, the tree is… giggling?

“Mor!” Az calls, shadow moving across the trunk in agitation. “Morrigan, open up, it’s me.”

More giggling— it sounds like more than one voice.

“Knock on the tree, Elain,” Az instructs, waving a shadowed hand at a loss, and Elain complies.

Az says again, “Please, Mor, I have a human that needs your help and I’m not going away until you come out.”

The giggling stops, replaced with muffled noises. The knot of the tree swings open like a little door, and a very tiny blonde fairy wrapped in a very tiny robe peers out, aura shimmering pinkish. “I came out decades ago, Azriel, don’t insult me,” she snaps.

Az looses a breath, head turning to Elain. “Setting her up for a gay joke always works.”

Mor scoffs, floating out of the tree on flickering wings to eye Elain critically. “This is the human?”

“The Labyrinth’s altering her senses,” Az says quickly. “I was hoping you could— you know.”

 _ElainElainElainElainElain_ pounds in Elain’s head, the repetition woozying. Still, she gets out a “Pleased to meet you, Lady Morrigan.”

The faerie rolls her eyes, lets out a long-suffering, overdramatic sigh. “Fine, Az, but next time you interrupt a date of mine I’m putting your shadow self into a box and throwing that box in the swamp.”

Before Elain can ask what, exactly, Mor is supposed to do, the faerie flits in front of her, takes a deep breath, and blows. A gust of sparkling wind smacks Elain in the face, cool and almost minty, and the voices wash away with it, magic crackling in her ears. Elain makes the mistake of breathing in with relief, and promptly chokes on glitter.

“Thank you, Mor,” Az says with relief.

“Yes, thank you!” Elain wheezes gratefully. The glitter coats her cheeks and crusts in her eyelashes, and she tries not to get any in her eyes as she rubs it away. But her vision and hearing are both, without a doubt, sharper and more true now, even aside from the absence of voices.

Mor tosses her length of white-silk hair as she surveys Elain. “What’s your business in the labyrinth, human?”

“I’m rescuing my sisters,” Elain says, feeling infinitely better with those voices gone. She wipes her glittery hands on her skirt, which accomplishes nothing. “From the Goblin King. Azriel’s helping me; he’s been ever so kind.”

Mor turns to look at Azriel, who says nothing.

“And my name is Elain.”

Elain can’t identify Mor’s expression as the fairy turns back to her, iridescent wings shimmering prettily as they catch the sun. “It’s nice to meet you, Elain.”

“Your wings are beautiful,” Elain says, a little shyly.

This, at least, gets Mor to break into a smile. “Why, you’re so sweet. They are, aren’t they?” She spins midair to show them off. Elain laughs.

“I’m so sorry we interrupted your date, by the way! I hope we haven’t made things awkward for you.”

“Not at all,” Mor says airily. “My partners know I’m worth waiting for.”

As if on cue, a pretty greenish faerie girl pokes her head out from behind the knot-door to peek at the conversation; Mor blows her a dramatic kiss and the girl ducks back inside with a smitten giggle.

The confidence is utterly natural on Morrigan, and Elain finds herself in admiration of it. “How long have you and Azriel known each other?” She asks.

“A very long time,” Azriel cuts in, moving to cover the tree. “And speaking of time, Elain…”

“Right. Of course.” The hourglass necklace weighs heavy on her neck. “We should go. Thank you again for your help!”

Mor gives Azriel another inscrutable look. “Wait just one second.”

She dives down and scoops something up from the ground— an acorn. She gives it a kiss, and drops it into Elain’s palm; minuscule glittery lip prints are left on the auburn shell.

“If you need me again, smash the acorn,” Mor says, looking pleased with her ingenuity. “I’ll know where to find you.”

Elain turns the thing over in her hand. “Thank you, that’s so thoughtful!” She smiles at Az. He, of course, is nothing more than an outline; his lack of expression hasn’t bothered her before now, but suddenly she wishes he weren’t quite so hard to read.

“That’s kind of you, Mor,” He says, muted.

“You take good care of her, Azriel,” Mor says, and if Elain didn’t know they were friends, she might think Mor bared her teeth at him a little.

 

***

 

“She’s lovely!” Elain gushes as they get out of earshot, “I’m glad some reasonable creatures live here, not just monsters.”

“I wouldn’t get too comfortable with the idea,” Azriel says, his shadow crossing tree trunk after tree trunk. “It’s mostly monsters.”

Elain hums a vague assent, slipping the acorn in her dress pocket. Maybe the faerie breath that cleared her ears cleared her mood too; she can’t help but feel bouyant, another of the Labyrinth’s challenges overcome.

“So how did you and Morrigan meet?” She asks, just to pass the time.

“I travel fast and frequently, so I meet many creatures. It’s why I know the Labyrinth as well as I do.”

A noncommittal answer. He dodged her question earlier about the king too. It makes some sense for a shadow to be secretive, she supposes, but also makes her curious.

“Do you like traveling the Labyrinth?” She asks, leaves whispering beneath her feet, “Or would you rather settle down with a nice shadow woman and a few shadow children in some nice dark nook?”

“I don’t think I’d ever do that,” Az says mildly.

“Don’t like children?”

“Don’t like women.”

“Oh,” Elain blinks. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“It’s quite alright.”

They walk in silence for a moment, but Elain can’t stop the grin from blooming across her face. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“What wasn’t so hard?”

“To tell me something about yourself.”

Az gives a huff of a laugh too, and Elain’s glad she hasn’t offended him. “There’s not much to know, my lady. I’m only a shadow.”

“Nonsense, that’s plenty to know!” Elain steps over a particularly fat root; the ground is increasingly hard to see, beneath the cover of trees in the fading daylight. “Firstly, I want to know if you had shadow parents, or if you were once the shadow of a man and you just got up and walked away one day. In which case I can’t say I blame you; it would be terribly tiresome to do nothing in life but follow someone around.”

“Neither of those,” he says, but there’s amusement in his voice. “I’ll tell you what; we shouldn’t travel while it’s dark. We find a place to make camp, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about being a shadow.”

After a moment, he speaks again. “Why do you care to know?”

“Why do you think?” Elain laughs, “I’m trying to be your friend.”

He says nothing to this, faceless figure giving nothing away, but Elain would like to imagine he smiles.

They find a suitable campsite in another few twists and turns, the crumbled wreck of what looks like a temple. The collapsed roof provides a perfect spot for Elain to sit, and with the sky darkening, Azriel coaches her through collecting firewood and arranging the kindling just so. Curious, that a shadow should know so much about fire, but then the Labyrinth is a place of contradictions.

“How are we going to light it?” Elain asks, brushing bits of dry lichen from her hands.

Azriel, whose clear outline is seated on the shadow of a rock thrown on the temple wall, points at a cluster of scrubby bushes near the steps of the temple. “With those.”

Little red-orange berries grow in twos and threes there. “The berries?”

“Take one and throw it at the kindling. Hard. Try not to miss.”

Elain does, and when the berry makes impact, a spectacular little flame leaps from its broken skin and sets the wood burning. Elain jumps back in alarm and Azriel laughs.

“Goodness,” Elain murmurs, sitting pointedly a bit away from it. “I hate to think of what happens when someone tries to eat one of those.”

Come to think of it, Elain hasn’t been hungry since she set foot in the Labyrinth. She’d been too concerned with immediate potential death to notice at the time, but even the lingering starvation-induced weakness she’s so used to fighting against has gone away. All the better that she doesn’t have to navigate figure out what’s safe to eat in this place.

She does feel tired, though. She can’t remember the last time she walked so much in a day. Elain lies on her side facing the fire, the slab of cracked marble beneath her radiating a faint chill through her cloak. “Do shadows eat and sleep like other things do, Azriel?”

“No.”

From this angle, he could almost be mistaken for sitting on the rock by the fire itself, not on the rock’s shadow on the wall, his outline fully opaque in the rapidly fading remnants of daylight.

“I miss it sometimes.”

It takes Elain a moment to place the sentiment, to determine what he’s telling her. “You miss it,” Elain repeats, staring into the fire. “Were you not always a shadow, then?”

He does not answer for a long time. Things rustle in the woods, an echo of the crackling of the fire. Elain plays with the chain of the hourglass necklace.

“Few things in the Labyrinth were born as they are now,” Azriel says finally, an answer and not. He sighs. “I wouldn’t tell you this if—“

“If what?”

“Elain, look at me.”

She does, and sits straight up with a start. Azriel hadn’t just looked like he was sitting on the rock proper, he is— the shadow’s flatness grows depth, a full physical form filling in the lines slowly as he becomes something not stuck to the wall, but well in front of it. And yet he’s still in shadow shades of black, a man bled of all color, corpselike: short tousled midnight hair and a ragged raven-colored tunic against dark, dark grey skin. Even the whites of his eyes set in a handsome, sharp face are storm-cloud grey, the lightest part of him. He’s barefoot.

Elain gapes at him. “You could take this form the whole time?!”

“No! No,” Azriel says quickly, hands going in front of him to reassure her, and Elain is so used to him being faceless that the effect of his expressions is alarming now. “When the sun goes down, I become more… real. Shadows are stronger at night.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Elain murmurs, taking him in. “Is this… what you looked like before you were a shadow?”

“Except for the coloring, yes.”

She would never fear Az, whose new face is painted with a tentative worry in the firelight, but still, the transformation is so unsettling it makes the skin of her arms prickle. She had vaguely assumed Azriel was— shadow or no— fae, and why wouldn’t she? He was a denizen of the Labyrinth. But her eyes catch on the tips of his ears: rounded, and the realization strikes her in the gut.

“And you’re… human.”

His gaze slides to the fire. “I used to be.”

Elain can’t help herself. “What happened? Oh—“ Her hand flies to her mouth. “You didn’t make some kind of wish too, did you? Did the Goblin King turn you into a shadow?”

Azriel huffs out a laugh. “No, for once he’s innocent. But I did piss off a different egomaniacal high fae who’s responsible for turning me into a shadow and sending me here.”

That might be the longest consecutive thing he’s yet said to her. Elain shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Why here?”

“I don’t know what the stories you know say, exactly. It’s been a long time since I was human. But the Labyrinth is Prythian’s unofficial prison, its dumping ground for the unwanted and the exiled,” Azriel recites quietly, and ruffles a hand through his hair. “For several hundred years the most fashionable thing you could do to someone who wronged you, if you had the power, was send them here, preferably in some monstrous form.”

Elain has known all her life how cruel the fae are, but bodily transformation alone, to say nothing of exile to a place as strange and inhospitable as this, seems abominable. “Our stories don’t say that, no,” she says gently. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry for me. I’m better off than most.”

“Has anyone who was sent here escaped?” Elain asks, thinking of the way Azriel slid in and out of the outer wall so easily, what seems like weeks ago.

Azriel shakes his head. “The Labyrinth was built to contain, a living piece of magic that’ll twist itself up in knots before letting anyone get away from it. The outer wall is only a formality; I can pass in and out of it all I like, but I’d never get far.”

He explains everything so evenly, no anger, no frustration, but Elain feels it for him, feels it burning in her perhaps more strongly than it should. “That’s horrible. No one should be trapped like that.”

“There are worse fates in Prythian,” Azriel says, very softly.

“That doesn’t make it not terrible.”

Azriel doesn’t answer that. Elain thinks of the story again, tries to recall what she does know.

“And the king,” she asks, something tightening deep within her chest to think of him, to say it out loud. “Is he trapped here too?”

“I don’t know if I’d compare his fate to the rest of ours,” Azriel says, a thread of bitterness winding into his voice, “But by definition, yes. Though in hundreds of years I haven’t known him to be too upset about it.”

She thinks of that sharp-toothed smile, that inhuman grace, and shivers. Such a creature probably should be locked up. Although perhaps Azriel is mistaken— he did appear to her at the cabin. Maybe he’s only freed conditionally to answer wishes, or to toy with mortals in their realm.

“Did you say…” hundreds of years. Suddenly something else falls into place in Elain’s mind, another comment he made.

“Did I say what?”

An owl hoots in the distance. “How many years have you been trapped here, Azriel?”

He doesn’t respond, and it only makes cold certainty grow in her stomach. “More than five hundred?”

“Elain—“

“Azriel,” it comes out a horrified whisper, “Were you a slave?”

“I—“ he looses a long breath, scrubs his hands over his face. “I don’t want sympathy, Elain. That’s not my life anymore.”

“That’s why you asked about my sisters and I being free,” Elain feels tears scratching at her throat again. “You were a human slave and you disobeyed and that’s why they sent you here.”

Perhaps it’s insensitive of Elain to say it so frankly, but she can barely process the thought without giving voice to the words themselves— it seems so horrifying, so impossible. The War, the time before it, is so rarely spoken of in human lands, as immemorably distant as it is. But here, where everyone is trapped in time, transformed, immortal, here the war and the time before it still haunt.

Elain stands and walks over to Azriel.

“Elain, what are you—”

She hugs him, bone deep and warm. There aren’t words for a thing like this, not when she’s sure she can only barely begin to comprehend the magnitude of it, but Elain has never needed words to speak. He’s stiff for a moment, and then relaxes little by little, putting his arms around her too, letting her hold him.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” he says, muffled into her shoulder.

“Of course not,” Elain says in response, giving his back the gentlest rub before pulling away, hoping her eyes don’t glisten with tears too obviously. “I think I should do the talking. What do you want to know?”

Ariel asks halting questions at first, fairly broad; what holidays does she keep, where in the realm is her village, what is the weather like there. But he quickly loses all hesitation, asks with enthusiasm about the town butcher and the state of the roads and what hunters treat their bows with to keep the wood from warping, wanting to know every useless detail of a free human’s life, dull as it is, and as Elain describes the current fashion he listens with a reverence that inspires a spark of pride in her home that she’s never felt before, never dreamed of feeling.

She talks endlessly as the fire burns away, embellishing only a little. The thick black night bears down on them until she’s lying on her side, wrapped in her cloak, eyes heavy as she mumbles out the way the town’s newest barn was built, the party that was held afterwards, what was in the drinks they served.

Silence lapses after, and she thinks perhaps he’s letting her fall asleep. She raises her head. “Az?”

“Sleep, Elain,” He says, so dark in the dying firelight he might as well be his shadow form. “I’ll keep watch.”

“I wanted to ask you, though,” she says thickly, through a blanket of warm tiredness. “Why are you helping me? You didn’t have to be so nice.”

He’s very quiet for a moment. “You seemed like you needed it.”

“But there must have been something that made you come back for me.”

In the silence that follows, she nearly falls asleep, so close that maybe she dreams Azriel’s response.

“I had two brothers that I lost a long time ago,” he says, voice a low murmur. “So I heard you tell the faeries about you searching for your sisters, and it… made me stop.”

Elain’s eyes drift close. “I’m glad you did.”

If Azriel says something else after that, Elain is too sound asleep to hear it.

 

***

 

It’s cold, and Elain wakes to a hand on her mouth.

She jumps, an instinctive scream in her throat that doesn’t make it out. Azriel's face is above her, tense, wrought. It’s still pitch dark out.

“We need to be quiet,” Azriel whispers, removing his hand, “And move fast. Can you do that?”

Elain blinks with waking confusion but nods as best she can, letting Azriel help her stand. The painfully early morning air chills her sweat and makes her dress stick to her body.

“Is something wrong?” she asks blearily, drawing her cloak around her while Azriel extinguishes the last of the fire, just a few smouldering sticks.

“We need to go, now.” There’s an urgency to him he didn’t possess yesterday, something bordering on panic, his movements precise and deadly. “We’ll get as far as we can before sunrise and I’ll have to give you what instructions I can from there.”

The wrongness of it makes Elain instinctively fearful, and she doesn’t argue as Azriel takes her hand and pulls her back into the twists and turns of the forest, nearly at a run: he looks over his shoulder like they’re fleeing something, but nothing pursues them. The whole Labyrinth seems still asleep, them the only living creatures as they dash through it, making incomprehensible turns and twists that leave Elain’s wrist strained as Azriel pulls her along.

“What are we running from?” she pants, when he releases her to let her catch her breath.

“We have to get as far as we can before he wakes up and notices us,” he says, quick and low. He swears, tugs a hand back through his hair. “Cauldron, Elain, I’m so sorry—”

Elain gestures in confusion. “Who are you talking about, the king? But it didn’t matter yesterday that he—”

A piercing sound splits the air: it sounds like a bird’s cry, though Elain gets the dreadful inkling that it isn’t. Azriel swears, grabs Elain’s hand, and pulls them into a run, dodging under branches Elain can barely see.

“Azriel, what was that?!” Elain cries, leaves whipping at her cheeks.

“That was— _shit_.” They come to a halt, Elain almost skidding into Azriel’s back.

The wooded corridors have closed in, impenetrable and looming overhead in the semidarkness, and in front of them is a tiny fox, red-brown fur vibrant. It cocks its head at Azriel.

“Shit, shit shit—” he looks left and right, chest heaving frantically, but Elain melts.

“Oh look, how cute!”

She moves to get closer, but Azriel takes her by the shoulders, looks her in the eyes with true, sobering panic. “Elain, listen to me, you need to run. If you take the next left and then the third right after that, that’ll—”

 _FWOOM_ . A surge of searing heat sweeps across them as a dozen trees burst into bright purple flame, making Elain instinctively flinch away from it. The fire glitters and snaps like fireworks Elain once saw at a party, but those were tame little things, parlor tricks of alchemy to make drunk people laugh, and this is not that, this is raw magic, a freed beast that _roars…_ and then stops. The fire is extinguished all at once.

“Good _morning_ , children.”

Elain and Azriel turn in parallel, clutching each other, to see the Goblin King standing in the wreckage of smoldering trees, some of them still glowing with embers. He looks furiously pleased, hair plaited and shining, in a fitted brown leather coat. His mouth is smiling but those mismatched eyes are not, and fear blooms in Elain’s stomach, cold enough to banish the fire’s warmth from her skin.

“Run, Elain. He’s here for me,” Azriel pleads, low and fervent. But Elain stumbles and doesn’t move: the Goblin King’s gaze is on her and the effect is paralyzing, only broken when Az steps between them and gets out a desperate, “Go!”

 _He won’t hurt me_ , she wants to say; he didn’t earlier, why would he now? But Azriel’s fear— the sense that he knows something Elain does not— is catching and Elain turns to run, makes for the deep dark shadows of the trees—

“Stay, Elain,” The king says, voice cutting across the clearing, enveloping her as if to draw her back.

A growl emanates from the forest as if in response, deep and animal, and Elain freezes. A hulking, massive shape emerges from the trees before her, coming into the predawn light one paw at a time: a beast like a bear and lion both, with massive tusk-like fangs and antlers that branch far above Elain’s head like a bone-white tree of death. It stares Elain down, lips curled threateningly, and she steps backwards, to the shelter of Azriel’s presence. The beast gives a final rumble in her direction and stalks around them to the king’s side, the muscles in its enormous body rippling with every step.

“This is Tamlin,” the king says, regarding it indulgently, and reaching a hand out to pet the creature’s muzzle. “I used to call him a friend of mine, until he started acting like a beast. So I gave him the form he deserved.” His eyes flicker back to them, chillingly empty. “I thought Azriel could use a reminder of what I do to people who defy me.”

Azriel’s breathing is shallow, tension rolling from him in waves, but his voice is steady. “I know very well what kind of man you are, Highness. Let Elain leave, your fight is with me.”

The king’s expression hardens, and the forest itself seems to grow sharper and more forbidding with his mood. “Yes, let’s talk about that,” he says, the lightest snarl tracing his words. “ _Why_ is it that I woke up to you disregarding our bargain and leading the human straight towards my doorstep?”

Azriel doesn’t respond, and the king advances on him, a fury coiling itself up like a snake preparing to strike. “You swan around my Labyrinth thinking yourself above my subjects, above me, on your noble little quest but when the mood strikes you you’ll turn and turn again, won’t you? Surely you know better after all this time than to tempt my displeasure that way?” The king’s face is close to Azriel’s, neither yielding, inches between them. The king’s voice drops a register, going dangerously soft. “Surely you haven’t forgotten what’s at stake for you?”

The king pushes back his coat to rest a leather-gloved hand on the hilt of a dull iron broadsword sheathed at his side. A bright red gem glints in the pommell. Pained hunger writes itself in the planes of Azriel’s face watching the motion, an agony that speaks of five hundred years of things Elain doesn’t understand; she feels like a doe watching two wolves stare each other down, loath to interrupt, hopelessly out of her depth, but she can’t help but blurt—

“What bargain?”

Their gazes turn on her, and Elain’s voice gets smaller. “Azriel? What bargain?”

A wicked smile slides across the king’s face. “Would you like to tell her, or shall I?” He asks Azriel, slick politeness.

“Don’t,” Azriel says, hoarse, futile, his stoicism crumbling, “Please—“

But the Goblin King just laughs, tells Elain, “After your first encounter with dear, sweet Azriel, I thought he might be the perfect person to help you.”

Elain falters. “Help me?”

Ariel takes a step back from them and shakes his head faintly, face contorted with pain. “Elain, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t go through with it, I—“

“Help you,” The goblin king enunciates, with a flash of teeth. “By leading you back out of the Labyrinth altogether.”

Elain feels something drop in her chest, a sick suspended feeling. “No. No, that can’t be true, Azriel—“

But it is true, it’s written all over his beautiful grey face that it’s true, and suddenly everything makes sense. Why he didn’t want to get to know her. Why Mor seemed suspicious. The sickly feeling spreads until it’s a tightness in her throat; not anger, just a seeping sadness.

“Azriel, how could you?”

“Elain, I’m so sorry, I—”

“And It was going wonderfully,” The goblin king cuts him off darkly, “Until he went and had an attack of conscience because a girl _hugged him_. Pathetic.”

“Don’t talk to him like that,” Elain says, the words coming trembling and unbidden.

The king’s focus goes to her, and something around his unearthly eyes tightens. “He betrays you and still you defend him?”

It’s a fair question. She doesn’t know why she’s doing it but how could she not, when Azriel looks so mournful before them, when the things he told her last night by the fire are true, no matter his motivations. Elain returns the king’s gaze as evenly as she can. “From you, yes.”

For a moment he just stares, and Elain is terrified he’ll snap, set the forest on fire with rage again. But then a slow smile carves his face.

He takes a step towards her, and another. “And how are _you_ finding my labyrinth, Elain dearest?”

She backs up on instinct, ungraceful in the face of his catlike prowl. “It’s— quite lovely, actually.”

Defiance does not sit easily on Elain, that is Feyre and Nesta’s domain, but she manages to keep her chin tilted up, to not cower even as a tree hits her back and he leans in, over her, and why hadn’t she realized until now how _tall_ he is?

“Is it?” he asks, almost pleasant as he adjusts one of his gloves. “Well, I should make it more difficult, then.”

“Please don’t?”

She means it to come out hard, sardonic, the way Feyre would say it, but instead it sounds like a breathy little question, and the king laughs at her, the sound rich and close and not quite human. He smells like the tang of magic and the unnatural smoke that clings to him from his entrance, and it’s making Elain’s skin prickle.

“Don’t worry, pet,” he croons, “It won’t be any harder than you can handle. I don’t want you dead.”

Elain feels her face going furiously red at the innuendo but also with surprise: she doesn’t think he’d hurt her, but somehow she thought he’d be quite pleased to find her eaten by the Suriel, or running herself to death chasing those false voices. She swallows. “You _don’t_ want me dead?”

He leans in even closer, one hand going to the tree trunk behind her, above her shoulder. “Of course not. What fun would that be?” His voice is low and quiet, laced with a dangerous smile, a heat that burns through Elain as surely as that glittering faery fire. “I want your spirit broken, I want you crushed and hopeless and surrendering to me, on your knees begging me sweetly for mercy— but certainly not dead.”

His eyes flicker to her lips. He reaches up with his free hand, leather creaking as his fingers ghost her jaw like he might cup it, lean in further, and Elain can’t breathe.

“Leave her alone,” Azriel snarls, reaching to separate them. In a swift moment, the king’s expression clouds with pure fury and before Azriel’s hand makes contact with the King’s shoulder, he’s flung backwards by an invisible force, back slamming into one of the charred tree trunks. Tamlin growls.

The king’s voice is thunderous, glint in his eyes unhinged. “Jealous, Azriel? Do you miss me?” Azriel chokes, claws at his neck, held fast to the tree as though an invisible hand is wrapped there, pinning him. “I gave you so much more than a hug. And yet your loyalty to me was so fickle.”

“Let him go!” Elain cries, frozen in place with terror, and the King turns back to her, those mismatched eyes piercing.

“I don’t _want_ you dead.” He says, and it’s a dark, twisted thing, the faux gentleness of before vanished. “But not everything in the labyrinth feels the way I do, and if it happens incidentally, well,” He steps back from her, leaving Elain trembling against the tree. “Pity.”

Across the clearing, he releases Azriel, who falls to his knees with a gasp, hand going to his bruised neck. Elain cries his name again, runs to him, and the King does not stop her.

Elain kneels next to Azriel and he looks up at her, panting. He’s started to fade, just slightly, as the earliest of dawn light peeks between the branches of the trees, purple and pink, but he’s still solid enough for Elain to see the pain and regret in those colorless eyes, for the hurt of his betrayal to come rushing back to her.

The king returns to Tamlin’s side, where the creature stands watching them with slitted green eyes, hackles slightly raised. “It would seem,” The king says, petting his monster absently, “That a punishment and a challenge, respectively, are in order, don’t you think, Tamlin?”

A thick snarl rumbles from the creature’s throat, lips curling back to reveal the full size of those gleaming white fangs, and the king’s meaning grips Elain slowly, her stomach sinking with fear as she helps Azriel stagger to his feet.

The king raises his head, fixes them both with that faerie gaze, heavy with his rage. “I would suggest you run.”

Tamlin roars, and launches himself at them.

 

this fic is also on [tumblr](https://valamerys.tumblr.com/post/164038059290/through-dangers-untold-ch-2-elucien-labyrinth-au)!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :O come find me on tumblr @valamerys to party!!!


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